With the outburst of media’s capability to reach out even to the remotest areas and the most isolated individuals, we also need to take into consideration the details that most of us tend not to observe-its asymptomatic effect.
In medicine, a disease is considered asymptomatic if the patient is carrier of the disease or an infection yet experiences no symptoms. This is also known as ‘clinically silent’ (Wikipedia). AIDS is an asymptomatic disease as it doesn’t show any signs and symptoms until the person will take the test and will found out that the root cause started 10 years ago.
Media has an accumulated effect (aside from being asymptomatic). A person will later on realize that her day is incomplete until he can to watch his favorite basketball game. A wife can’t complete her day without watching her favorite TV talk show or a child cannot eat if not in front of a television. Now these are accumulated effects. Did this happen overnight? No. But how come there are certain individuals that cannot ‘live’ without being sustained by there every habit related to media.
Filipino women have fair complexion yet media reflects that for a woman become prettier, you need to have a skin as white as snow that will make stand out in the darkest area of our society. Now what makes many of us embrace this belief? Because most of the time, media tend to tell us to overcome the notion that we must be regular. It tells us that it takes us the chance to become extraordinary and leads us to become the mediocre.
But let’s put off the limelight on media’s negative effects, let us also take into consideration how media greatly help us in our everyday lives. Because of media, a common man gets a flash report in just a “flash” on his screen. Distance is no longer a barrier, as discussed earlier, media can now be considered as the new, “faster than a speeding bullet”, let’s see if superman wont get insecure of how media has evolved, hope he has realize that he also has to change as everything around him does – by putting on the underpants the way it should, be but who cares? Media says it’s totally fine.
This contradictions are also the same on how media works in every each of us. It has the capability of influencing us in everyday of our lives, with every possible means and also taking into consideration that we are in the 20th century where everything is connected to – digital such as digital communication, transportation and the like. Everything works thru wires, satellite and other ‘high-tech’ devices. Things that at times we tend not to put attention to its ‘asymptomatic effect’. But like what the famous saying goes, Ignorance is no excuse. Every each of us needs to learn how to be equipped with the knowledge that could give us the capability to distinguished “real” information versus information from the “reel”. And how can one be equipped of this knowledge? Through Media Literacy.
Media (or Cine) literacy is a repertoire of competences that enable people to analyze, evaluate, and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and forms. Education for media literacy often uses an inquiry-based pedagogic model that encourages people to ask questions about what they watch, hear, and read. Media literacy education provides tools to help people critically analyze messages, offers opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and helps them develop creative skills in making their own media messages (Wikipedia).
Being media literate, we will be able to distinguished what’s “hot”, what’s “not”. What are substance and what are just sub-stance. We always need to bear in mind that, WE ALL HAVE THE ABILITY, THE DIFFERENCE IS HOW WE USE IT.
